“... out of office I met Callaghan at a party and, after being well patronised about the pessimistic little book that Peter Kellner and I had done on him, told him that he would lose the vote and the ensuing election. He was still blandly convinced that Thatcher lacked the credibility – it’s difficult to remember now how popular it was then to dismiss her as ...”

“... at Dryden, ascribed to him an improbable patrician nonchalance at ‘Showing great mastery, with little care’. Shadwell went on to demonstrate this newfound sprezzatura by making heavy weather of Dryden’s heavy weather with the ‘mannerly obscene’, adding for the ornithological record that Poet Squab’s plumage was borrowed. Not only the name, but ...”

“... were getting unfair advantages in land and in publicly-funded services. Too many knew too little history, and even less about Australia’s human rights obligations under international treaties. The Hansonites’ open resentment of those treaties is only a few degrees cruder and less informed than that of the Coalition. In the course of the Howard ...”

“... interpret the feverish speculation it unleashed on social media? A minute or two in this cramped little space up in the air, between floors. It’s the kind of thing that’s often dismissed as trivial gossip, not something that should matter to us. But that would be to miss the point entirely about what we used to call the zeitgeist, and Solange Piaget ...”

“... with an interest in these areas, the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company, showed little interest in exploring them: a sign perhaps that existing trade routes had already determined the shape and, ultimately, the extent of Britain’s Empire, and that even the wildest imaginings of geographers could not make its ventures more ...”

“... seems likely that Miracles of Life will be Ballard’s last book. In the brief concluding chapter, little more than a page long, he says that in June 2006 he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. He made the decision to write his autobiography early in 2007, and finished the book in September. He has always worked ...”

“... what to do with all those years of obscurity. Ross’s major predecessor as a Sterne biographer, Arthur Cash, coped with the difficulty by writing, in effect, two books. The first volume, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years, was published in 1975 and left Sterne in 1760, on the road from York to London, hurrying to embrace his literary destiny. We ...”

“... years of no histories, and at the end, effectively, of the Western empire itself. Ammianus is a little ‘wobbly’, as Burrow puts it, on high politics, but good on Rome’s low life, gaming and gossiping in theatre doorways, and on its rich, who were anxious to be recorded as serving the biggest fish and roast dormice in town. He was sympathetic to the ...”

“... experiences. ‘They’re young. They’re in love. They rob banks,’ was the tag line for Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Self-importantly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut was originally slated to direct it, but decided to make Fahrenheit 451 instead), the film portrayed the star-crossed criminals as free ...”

“... including a horse-drawn wagon from Warwick, ‘but their efforts to douse the flames met with little success.’ Half a century’s worth of padded costumes, varnished props and canvas sets fuelled the conflagration, while the mock Tudor half-timbering provided perfect tinder and the Gothic observation tower, ‘with its water-tank for use in the event of ...”

“... prosper.’ In the 1990s the US undertook more than twenty foreign military interventions, with little but anarchic carnage to show for them.Mearsheimer’s response was The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), in which he subjected several of the liberal pieties of the previous decade to closer inspection. In the wake of the ‘no-fault’ aerial ...”

“... as fraudulent theatre; the circle of real political agents always remains small. Bevins has little time for speculation on the ‘deep state’ or international activity, though he notes that the Gulf monarchies covertly funded the astroturf groups that rolled behind the military coup in Egypt. ‘We were played,’ says one activist from Tahrir.In the ...”

“... epicene GG poses topless in sneakers and tennis shorts, a sweater around her neck and an adorable little white beret perched stylishly on her head. She’s brown, louche and Amazonian, and more distressingly beautiful than in any official studio publicity shot I have ever seen. O, for such beings to play ping-pong with! When the book came out, Garbo never ...”

“... Seberg; Jovovich. The fame of Joan of Arc began in her lifetime and, though it has dipped a little now and then, she has never vanished from view. Her image acts as a magic mirror of personal and political idealism and, in particular, of changing ideas about women’s heroism. She has proved an inexhaustible source of inspiration for ...”

“... and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was interred with him, and they were joined in their grave shortly afterwards by their grieving vent-widow. In the 1950s, an Australian singer who used to appear on stage with her vent-husband Herbert Dexter found ...”